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A reading featuring Saltonstall Foundation residency alumna, Celina Su (’12) and discussion hosted by local entrepreneur & business owner Ashley Cake!
Sunday, November 16 / 5:00 to 6:00pm
Autumn Leaves Books / 115 E State St. (on The Commons)
Join us in downtown Ithaca as we host Celina Su for a reading of her recently published book, Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities. (Princeton University Press)
Celina will be joined by Ashley Cake for a post-reading discussion you will not want to miss!
Princeton University Press, 2025
Amid political repression and a deepening affordability crisis, Budget Justice challenges everything you thought you knew about “dull” and daunting government budgets. It shows how the latter confuse and mislead the public by design, not accident. Arguing that they are moral documents that demand grassroots participation to truly work for everyone, the book reveals how everyday citizens can shape policy to tackle everything from rising housing and food costs to unabated police violence, underfunded schools, and climate change–driven floods and wildfires.
Drawing on her years of engagement with democratic governance in New York City and around the globe, Celina Su proposes a new kind of democracy—in which city residents make collective decisions about public needs through processes like participatory budgeting, and in which they work across racial divides and segregated spaces as neighbors rather than as consumers or members of voting blocs. Su presents a series of “interludes” that vividly illustrate how budget justice plays out on the ground, including in-depth interviews with activists from Porto Alegre, Brazil, Barcelona, Spain, and Jackson, Mississippi, and shares her own personal reflections on how changing social identities inform one’s activism.
Essential reading to empower citizens, Budget Justice explains why public budgets reflect a crisis not so much in accounting as in democracy, and enables everyone, especially those from historically marginalized communities, to imagine and enact people’s budgets and policies—from universal preschool to affordable housing—that will enable their communities to thrive.
Celina Su is the Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies and a Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York, a former Senior Democracy Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and the recipient of a Berlin Prize in public policy. Her latest book is Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities, from Princeton University Press. Her other publications include Streetwise for Book Smarts: Grassroots Organizing and Education Reform in the Bronx (Cornell University Press) and pieces in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, n+1, and elsewhere.
Ashley Cake was born and raised in Ithaca, NY and has been a lifelong service worker in the hospitality industry, most recently owning and operating The Watershed & The Downstairs. She is an award-winning labor and public safety advocate, serving on the boards of organizations from Ithaca Underground to Alternatives Federal Credit Union. In her academic career, Ashley has written and taught extensively on Enwhitenment European philosophy — particularly Soren Kierkegaard and Lacanian psychoanalysis — as well as comparative religion — particularly American social justice and liberationist histories. Her current praxis seeks to work the critical junctures of abolition, emergent strategies of care and transformative justice, which is to say: Land Back & Reparations.
